Sunday, 18 March 2018

Rookie Biker in the Outback (Day Four)

Day Four

Brolga cranes,
wedge-tailed eagles and whistling kites seemed to litter the sky on the morning
of the fourth day of our Outback challenge.Dan had said more than once that he preferred 'challenge' to either
'adventure' or 'rally'.Indeed, it was a
challenge.The bikes were small and the
roads were beginning to get rougher.

Before I left
UK I'd shown someone a picture of the Honda 110 and he sneered and called it a
'girlie bike'.Well hell, mate, it's a
lot more difficult ploughing through dirt on a girlie bike than on a 650 Macho
Machine like Charlie and Ian use.The
narrow tyres, the lack of engine power, the weight of the goods on the rear,
all make the little Honda difficult to handle off road.It dances on the dust.It would pirouette if it was allowed to.It certainly bucks like an ornery mule at odd
times, just when you're not expecting it.No worries, mate, the Postie Bike's no girlie when it comes to battling
with cracks and craters.I said to the
critic, 'What would be easier, pal – crossing the Atlantic on a cruise ship or
setting off in a girlie rowboat?'

I knew from
Pete we were coming to bull dust days and keeping one's bum on the seat was not
going to be as easy as before.But I
just loved the scenery in the mornings.The sense of foreverness did not go away.In fact it increased.I recalled the lines from a poem by the
American, Robert Frost: 'You cannot scare me with your spaces between the
stars, where no human race is, I have it in me much nearer home, to scare
myself with my own desert places'.Of
course, he could have been talking about the empty places in our lives or in
our spirits – poets are deep fellahs when you start to probe – but equally he
may have meant the Australian Outback.

As I hummed
along the empty highway, heading out into the sandy-coloured unknown, I thought
about the previous night's camp at Barcaldine.We camped at the show ground where there just happened to be a country
show in progress.Tractors there were in
plenty, and rare breed sheep, cattle, horses, tame carpet snakes, quad bikes,
pies, beer, and all the rest of the paraphernalia you find at country fairs
everywhere.All the men wore big cowboy
hats and all the women sported big cowgirl hats.There was line dancing in a cowshed and
Country songs belting out from a barn.We were no longer the main curiosity, us postie bike riders.There were other serious contenders for that
crown at Barcaldine.

Most of our
riders put up their tents in an empty cattle stall or stable.I preferred the open air.It didn't seem right putting up a tent
without using the pegs.

The Country
songs went on until the early hours of the morning, but I was so tired from the
long haul along the bitumen, with its 'white-line fever', that I just fell onto
my air bed and went out like a light.

Again, today,
it's all bitumen, or bitch-u-men, as some of the riders called it.I love the Aussie habit of twisting the words
to get something quite outrageously descriptive from it.

At noon I
passed a rider with a blown front tyre.

As always, we
crossed over several dry creeks, all of them with original names, some of them
quite intriguing.'Big Dinner Creek' and
later, 'Little Dinner Creek'.One creek
we crossed must have brought a smile to everyone's face.It was called 'Christmas Creek' and it was
way out in the bush, 2000 kms from anywhere, not a house in sight, not a town
for miles, yet someone had decorated its stunted trees with tinsel, baubles and
paperchains.

How's that for
an Aussie sense of humour?

It’s as quirky as the
British.

Near where I live in the UK is a
town called Great Dunmow where every year since the Middle Ages they have held
the Dunmow Flitch Trials.This ‘court’
awards a ‘flitch’ (a side of bacon) to married couples from anywhere in the
world if they can satisfy the a jury of 6 maidens and 6 bachelors that they
have been married for a least ‘twelvemonth and a day’ and have not during that
time wished themselves unmarried.There
are many such idiosyncracies in many odd towns in the UK.

Australia has invented its own
such bizarre events.One of the more
famous ones takes place in Alice Springs every year and is called the
Henley-on-Todd regatta.The Todd River
is dry baked earth.Every spring ‘No
Fishing’ signs go up along the dusty banks of this Aussie wadi and people start
building boats with holes in the bottom.The contestants stick their legs through the holes and race the boats
along the hot sandy bottom of a waterless river bed.There are ‘yachts’, ‘Oxford tubs’, and
bottomless ‘eights’.Those taking part
are bombarded with flour bombs and other such weapons.The town is 1,500 kms from the nearest body
of water.Some of those taking part are
said to be sane.

Later that
day, I was on my own, travelling through the eerie landscape of Dreamtime, when
out of the dust haze came a shimmering line of dark riders on even darker
Harleys.Black bandannas swathed their
faces, black sunnies covered their eyes, black beards wrapped their chins,
black dome-helmets sat uneasily on their heads -black everything, everywhere.

Sinister.Strange.Weird.

I felt a
tingling go through me.They could have
been phantom riders from 'Lord of the Rings', except they were on big bikes,
not horses.They passed me by with
barely a flicker of acknowledgement, me on my little red pony and they on their
big black war horses.I stopped a little
later and took a drink and mused a for a while.I got to wondering if they were the Christmas Creek Chapter of the
Hell's Angels, on their annual pilgrimage to decorate their shrine.

Afterwards I
learned they were members of Bikers United Against Child Abuse.Good blokes, not bad guys.

Anyway, today
it was Barcaldine to Winton, a journey of 294 kms, making our total mileage –
sorry, kilometreage – to date 1554 kms.Had we ridden so far, so quickly?Who was I to doubt the speedo?294 kms was an easy ride, especially on tarmac, so we had time to dawdle
and gape.We would be passing through
Longreach, where stood the Stockman's Hall of Fame and the QANTAS Museum.I had seen stockmen out in the fields, riding
their stock horses.Grizzled, sunburnt,
star-burnt faces, some of them Aboriginal.Hard, tough-looking characters that one associates with Australia.Never mind your mid-Western USA cowboys,
these stockmen were as granite and teak fused together.They looked a part of the landscape over
which they rode.

'Are we
stopping at the Hall and Museum?' I yell to Pete and John, as we pause to water
the bush.

Pete says,
'Don't worry about Quaint-arse, but you might find the Hall of Fame quite
interesting.'

And so we
did.It was indeed an interesting
museum, full of tack and tackle, and farm machines, and pictures and stories of
famous Outback men.You have to be
someone special to live and die in the Outback.It must be a hell of a lonely life, but probably a fulfilling one.They know who they are.Us city folk (OK, I live in a Suffolk
village, but I have travelled the world) really never find out who we are.They have their daily tasks and they get down
and do them and don't whinge or whine or sweat over their lot in life.

I felt the
same about the gold miners of the Canadian Yukon, when I visited Dawson City,
that clapboard town on the Klondike where bitumen is unknown.Many hope-filled miners still exist there.They eke out a living from their mines these
days, not striking it rich, but finding enough nuggets to make ends meet, so
that they can continue to look for more nuggets.They're called 'sour doughs' in Canada, after
the sour bread dough they used to take with them to last out the terrible -50
degree winters you get in the Yukon.

You have to
know who you are to be digging in the ground in weather like that, not even
guaranteed enough gold to make a decent tooth filling.

I learned at
the Hall of Fame that the Aussie stock horse is possibly the most versatile
horse in the world.It's known as, 'The
breed for every need'.Tough, resilient
and strong, they have the speed of a cheetah and the agility of a mountain
goat.(In fact they reminded me of our
Honda postie bikes.)Among other things,
such as polo and show jumping, the stock horse is apparently good at
campdrafting.I have to admit at that
point in time I had no idea what 'campdrafting' was.

The Australian
stock horse grew out of a one-time need for military mounts and work horses
that were required for a variety of army tasks over the last two
centuries.This led to the all-rounder
we know today as the Aussie stock horse.I also heard these beasts referred to as 'walers' but whether that
strictly meant horses from New South Wales or not, I failed to discover.Today you can buy a three-year old
second-hand Honda 110 for about $1000, whereas a stock horse will set you back
at least $3000, but more likely $10,000.If you feel you need one, go to Dalby Queensland in December of any
year, but if you want a really good
goer in a private sale, take along a thick wad of notes amounting to somewhere
in the region of $200,000.

Back on the
road I was passed by DIPSTICK BRO and GERONIMO, the road names written on the
backs two riders.I knew the latter was
my pal from Leicestershire, John, but with a lot of the blokes and bloke-esses
I never ever did get to know all the real names, so Dipstick remains Dipstick.We were heading now for Winton, home of
Waltzing Matilda, the song written by Banjo Patterson.This was where he first performed the
unofficial National Anthem of our antipodean cousins.It's a great song, once heard it buries itself
in the psyche whether you are Australian or not, and is sadly mutilated by the
Barmy Army when they're trying to get the under the skins of the Aussie team
cricket supporters, bless their English socks.

Around
mid-afternoon I was almost shouldered into a ravine by a road train.Road trains are truly terrifying creatures:
the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the Outback.A
monstrous cab pulling up to three long trucks taking up almost all the road
space. This oblong giant appeared out of the heat haze on the highway enveloped
in a huge cloud of dust which he kindly shared with every other road user,
including me.I slowed down to pull of
the track, as I was supposed to do, when I realised there was a drop off the
edge about a metre deep.I had nowhere
to go as the monster drew up alongside me, all 54 metres of him.He was a cattle truck and as well as dust
there was the stink of penned animals to contend with.I was coughing and spluttering as he
thundered past me with centimetres to spare, when from the other direction
along comes another beast of the same magnitude.My truck then edges towards me to give the
guy room on the other side of the road.Now I was riding on a strip of track only a few inches wide with the
drop on my left yawning.I braked, not realising
one of the other riders was right on my back wheel.He skidded up alongside me and we both
teetered on the brink of oblivion for a few moments, before finally the road
train squeezed away again.

Cold sweat
mingled with the warm stuff, as I gathered myself together and tried to stop my
heart from jumping out of my mouth.The
other rider gave me a look.I gave him a
look back.Then we both disentangled
ourselves and sped away.I never did
learn who he or she was: when you’re all kitted up in your road armour you’re
virtually anonymous - but I never braked after that without looking in my rear
view mirror, even if I did have the king of dinosaurs fighting me for road
space.

We rolled into
Winton in small groups, twos and ones like old-time sundowners, ready for the
evening meal.It had been another day of
mystical scenery and wide wide landscapes.Who would not be a sundowner or a swagman in this great country?It was made for the wanderer, the traveller
through ancient ways.Hence, of course,
the Walkabout, which had probably been going on since Man first arrived on the
Australian shore in their little boats, looked around him, and said to his
companion, 'Bloody hell, mate, we've picked a winner here.Never mind the weekend camping, we can do it
all the time.The camping grounds go on
forever.'

In those days,
of course, he had to contend withprehistoric mammals such as the Doom Duck, a monstrous flightless bird
that could swallow a pig whole, and various other big fellahs: marsupial lions,
marsupial wolves and a load of huge lumpy looking monsters that might have been
rhinos or hippos.No doubt the boys and
girls slept in the forks of trees and never went Walkabout without a
spear.It's not difficult even now to
imagine those old mammals lumbering about the landscape, looking for new meat
on two legs.

Our camp that
night was in the local footy oval, where they play – well, play is a sort of loose word when it comes to Aussie rules
football, since the object seems to be to murder as many of the opposing
players as possible – that unfathomable blood sport which only Australians
understand, but many other nationalities enjoy watching in the way that they
would the spectacle of gladiators killing each other in an arena.

The area was
already littered with tents that were up, tents that were half up and tents
that were flat as pancakes.Riders were
milling about, talking, drinking beer, getting showers, doing bike
maintenance.It was the gathering of the
herd.Stories were being swapped.Disasters were being recounted.So-and-so had gone into a ditch and bent his
gear lever.Whatisname had blown a tyre
and had ended up in a thorn tree.Thingymejig had run out of gas out in the plains of nowhere and couldn’t
start his bike for twenty minutes after refuelling.Such conversations floated through the
evening ether as the herd milled.

Once the tents
were up and showers taken we were conveyed in a bus to a kind of craggy hill
top similar to the one in the movie Picnic
at Hanging Rock.It appeared to be
an ancient place, no doubt with Dreamtime significance.There were gullies and strangely-shaped rocks
sculpted by wind and water out of the landscape.It did not take much to imagine
carpet-snake-people and hare-wallaby-people meeting here to foment war or seal
a peace.The view over the plains was
awesome.A sort of scarred browny-red
landscape stretched out on all sides, mile upon mile upon mile, to the far
horizons.

We watched as
the sun went down behind a distant range of hills and I'm sure we all
experienced that humble feeling one gets while witnessing a natural occurrence
where a fantastic but simple beauty is produced by a common-or-garden event –
simply, the end of an ordinary day.Therays of the dying sun
stretched out over the russet landscape to enhance the ochre redness of the
soil.It could have been the end of a
Jurassic day, or as it actually was, a day several million years after giant
lizards lumbered over the land.Certainly the ghosts of dinosaurs were there, tramping over that ancient
earth.

Once the
natural phenomenon of a huge dark-red sun sinking into a vast dark-red
landscape had ended and things spiritual gave way to things mundane, we tucked
into a great meal provided by the Winton Lions Club.The yarns began, the camaraderie growing with
every day.Any wariness had now been
tucked away as riders got to know each other better and like-minded people
swapped biking tales, stories of where they came from and what they did, and
all those exchanges thathappen when a
group starts coming together.

Over these
exchanges I learned that Ewan, my new buddy from Darwin, had had to change his
bike for one of the spares.His first
bike refused to start after he'd stopped at the Stockman's Hall of Fame.I stroked my own machine, hoping she would
not prove as fickle.So far she had been
an absolute beauty, starting every time, running as smoothly as a young
colt.I did have one bit of trouble, but
that was my fault.I found out that if I
turned off the engine while it was still in gear I had hell's own job of
getting it into neutral.It had to go into neutral, because you
couldn't start it in gear.If you did it
would leap out of your hands like a kangaroo with its pants on fire and bury
itself in the nearest inanimate object.

I kicked down
and kicked down, but realised I would do some damage if I jumped on the gear
lever any harder.So cap in hand I went
to Richard-the-mechanic, who showed me how to gently rock the beast back and
forth until she slipped into neutral.From that moment on I never switched off the engine while the bike was
in gear.I thanked Richard humbly –
thanks he waved away with a yeah-sure – aware that my biker inexperience had
shown, probably not for the first time.

'What did you
think of the Hall?' asked Ewan, over a beer.

'Not a bad
little museum,' I said.'How about
you?You're a local.Did you learn anything?'

'Probably, but
what struck me most were the items which displayed as being part of the
pioneer's time – the early days of the bush.Things like saddler's repair kits, wind-up telephones and milk delivered
in billy cans.What worries me is I remember those things as a kid.It makes me feel old.'

Ewan is about
a quarter of a century my junior.

'Listen,' I
said, 'I remember when eggs came as dried powder in cans – you ain't as old as
me, mate.I was six years old before I
saw a real egg and I thought it was a squashed tennis ball . . .'But though things were starting to get
fanciful, I really had known a time when dried egg and powdered lemonade came
to our house in cans, back in the olden days.

There were
stories about the road kills we had seen that day – feral pigs, kangaroos of
course, even cattle.Ewan also told the
tale of the live black snake that was minding its own business, crossing the
road, when a line of riders came at it.The first rider tried to miss the creature, but this local serpent was
stretched from one side of the bitumen to the other.In the event, the lead postie biker clipped
its tail.The snake was naturally
incensed at this uncalled-for treatment and reared up, swishing itself about as
other riders come upon it.There was a
great deal of dodging and swerving, as bikers fought to remain upright without
hitting the snake or getting bitten.

'The
choreography was brilliant,' said a tall Irish-Australian, a three-timer on the
Postie Bike Challenge.'Nureyev could
not have done it better.'

Oh, and one of
the guys told me what 'campdrafting' is.It's sort of herding cattle in a precise way.The stockman cuts out one of the herd and
hustles it into a pen the way a Welsh Border Collie does with a sheep.Something like that.Apparently it's become a popular rodeo sport
with youngsters and oldsters proving their skill with the stock horse.Good Outbacky stuff.